Zapatista y la Madre Tierra

Due to sudden bad weather conditions (wind, rain, clouds, but not really cold for me) the airplain could not leave today. So there we were struck with the three of us (Carolina and Armando the young veterinarian who will give the workshop and speaks tseltal), farmer-promoter Santiago who arrived at the hotel at 7 o´clock, our luggage and a total of 20 kg of beans for Juan and Manuel. Also Diego another farmer-promoter passed by and we spend all day talking.
For me a great opportunity to get to know them already before going to the villages and they also seem to enjoy it (maybe because we invite them for meals?) and ask continous questions on Holland. They cannot believe we can survive without tortillas, eating so much bread. We speak about cows, wooden shoes, organisation of the people, their struggle for the right on their land etc. Diego decides that Holand must be a poor country, because we do not have selva, real forest left. And when he hears the Dutch language with its many g´s he finally admits that I am different than the gringo´s... Being coquet as he is, he then suggest I come and stay here and live in the forest like their queen.

Well yesterday I already got very well introduced in the very complex reality of this place: the Zapatista struggles and the internal division of the two regions (Amador-Hernandez and Candelaria) in which we work and who were one untill last October. But maybe we have to go back a little in history to grasp some of it:
The tzeltal people we are working with have come to the selva (forest) only in the 1940. Before they worked for the land owners and they were offered the possibility to find their own fields in the forest. Much later the government declared the area a Natural Biosphere of the Monte Azules and the people were pressed to leave their new lands - but where to go? Still many of them do not have the rights over their lands.
In 1994 there was the Zapatista uprising of the EZLN and many of "our" farmers participated. The stance of the EZLN is not to allow any government intervention (with good reasons!), so they decided recruiting their own promoters for health, education, agriculture, cattle and throw out the governmental teachers, doctors etc. They could do this with the help of the international support they received (and some say that nowadays also because of narco-traffic...).
However the region where we work is very isolated and received little of this support... therefore they now are slowly accepting government help, often through NGOs that usually have good intentions. This does however create internal struggles with the EZLN.

It has created a split between the regions we are working in, as one of them has allowed state teachers to the village. Only to state teaching do children receive diplomas that they can use to go studying on elsewhere. Also the village does not have enough money to educate his own teachers.
So Lazaro and Diego (the same) of ARIC came by to our breakfast to impress us with a revolutionary talk and to state the official stance that our NGO CETAMEX has two choose loyalty to one of the two regions. And also that they belong to the group who refuses any goverment intervention. CETAMEX receives his funds from several sources, one of them being the government. For this reason they want to reconsider in their reunions and assambleas (which are a beautiful example of popular democracy but also of all its problems of slowness and rivalry!) our work.
Carolina was already worying about not being able to continue working and defended herself by saying that "All I am doing is playing around with the maize, looking with the farmers at how they can select and make their crops grow better and how to cure their animals. Even though you are divided, you are all interested in that are not you?". The responses were very ambivalent, on the one hand reinforcing the official stance with a lot of rethoric, but on the other hand showing that they liked Carolina as a person and really wanted her to keep coming to give workshops, that actually there was no problem...
Can imagine that it makes her nervous at times!!

Afterwards, Manuel, came in talking about another workshop to be organised on green manure and soil conservation, while meanwhile trying to see if he could somehow get a bit of money from us, or at least a camara and a radio that he was "ofcourse going to need, being the coordinator".

In the afternoon I had the chance for a longer talk with Santiago alone and he spoke to me beautifully about La Madre Tierra and how he stopped burning and is now using mulching and green manures to help her to recuperate. He compares her to ourselves: when young we can resist a lot and work hard, when older we loose our energy, we then need to rest and be feeded.
He tells me that he is sure that he is much happier here in the forest than he would be in the city, because here he can decide which days to work and which days to rest. "In the city, when you do not work, you do not eat - here the forest always provides us with something to eat". Besides his oldest son (8) can come with him to the field or any other place to help him working and learn by doing.

Waiting all day we decided to take a walk to a nearby university and see if they had anything to offer to us and our farmers. What followed was a typical formal economical scientist versus subsistence farmer (campesino) interaction or better said: lack of interaction.
The guy used a lot of difficult terms to explain their support projects for farmers who want to start a negocio, small business. Santiago seemed to want to leave as soon as possible and Diego when asked for questions, could only mutter: "uhm, yes, no, well, you see on one side... uhm¨.
So I asked the guy to give us examples so that we could understand it better. Diego was quite interested in the idea of eco-tourism (for gringitas like Jenneke!) or selling coffee, but knew it is almost impossible in their isolated place... Besides when he heard that it was actually a lend of which payback had to be guaranteed by capital or land that could be sold, he was definite: I will never risk my land!!!
The farmer and his land are here, like in every place in the world (and maybe even more here where so much blood is spend on defending it), very strongly connected...

After our walk "ai ies guinal", or ¨I am hungry¨and we decided to eat in the market place, to save a bit of money (with us paying for everyone... farmers being good eaters..). I eated fish, since it was either that or meat. And do not try to explain your reasons for being vegetarian to a farmer of the forest, they look at me as though I am half crazy and then just decide to ignore the subject...

I am very happy to be able to talk to them this well (although it will still be hard to ask them questions for the research, since their answers are often not directly connected to the question...) and that they seem to accept me at least as a person to talk and joke with. In Ocosingo there are hardly any other foreigners and Carolina says she will be rich if receiving a peso for every time I am jelled at, fluiten/silvar at, laughed or looked at "gringa, gringita"!